Primary suspect in '77 murder of Bristol woman dies

If Harry Ritterson knew anything about his niece’s brutal, unsolved murder, he took that information to his grave.

The 77-year-old Easton man passed away Sunday night in a Warren County hospital, following a bout with prostate cancer.

Prosecutors on Tuesday confirmed that Ritterson was the main suspect in 20-year-old Shaun Eileen Ritterson’s 1977 death, a killing that was chronicled in this newspaper’s special investigation series: The Girl on Church Hill. And they say his death will not stop them from trying to find out who killed the 20-year-old Bristol woman.

“A lot of corroborating evidence pointed in Harry Ritterson’s direction,” said Matt Weintraub, the county’s chief of prosecutions. “With a little more forensic investigation, we think we can solve this case.”

Shaun Ritterson’s nude body was found June 12, 1977, on the side of what was then called Church Hill in Buckingham, just a short distance downhill on the north slope from Holicong Road.

She had been stabbed multiple times and gutted like a deer.

The killing terrorized the community, as rumors of serial killers and cultists circulated through the still-rural Buckingham area.

Shaun was last seen at a Bristol Township bar. Within weeks police had focused on Harry Ritterson, after numerous witnesses told them that he and Shaun often went drinking together and had an unusually close relationship.

Harry Ritterson was questioned and even took a lie detector test. The results were not made public, but police records indicate that he remained a suspect. After weeks of being tailed by detectives, he hired an attorney who forced police to stop following him.

Detectives moved on to other cases, and Shaun’s killing remained a mystery.

In 2011, prosecutors granted Calkins Media reporters access to the decades-old police files in exchange for a synopsis of the case. After reading that report, the Bucks County DA’s office reopened the investigation into Shaun’s murder and the FBI agreed to test physical evidence that had been saved from the crime scene.

In a May 2012 interview, Harry Ritterson said he knew that he had been blamed for killing Shaun. He said the allegation haunted him, and he wanted to clear his name.

“All these years I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Shaun,” he said. “She was my favorite. She was a good kid. We got along good together.”

Ritterson told a reporter that he would gladly work with detectives to help solve the case so they could rule him out.

“I’ll take a DNA test or anything,” he said.

But after agreeing to meet with detectives at the county courthouse in Doylestown, Ritterson changed his mind. Through his girlfriend, Karen Koplin, he sent a message to reporters saying he didn’t want to be involved in the investigation, due to his failing health.

An email sent to Koplin on Tuesday was not immediately returned.

Prosecutors have not said what the FBI uncovered in the evidence samples they were sent, but earlier this month detectives prepared a search warrant and were poised to collect Ritterson’s DNA and other evidence at his home. He died before the warrant could be served.

In the search warrant, police state that “several brown head hairs exhibiting Caucasian characteristics microscopically dissimilar to (Shaun’s)” were found during the autopsy. Police also have a nightgown and a bedsheet with blood on them.

Investigators wrote in the warrant that Ritterson’s friend Raymond Albright, who stated he, Ritterson and Ritterson’s then-girlfriend Jackie Lea had left for the Poconos on June 11 and stopped at Church Hill on their way. During that stop, about 150 yards from where Shaun’s body was found the next day, Ritterson wandered away from Albright and Lea for about five minutes to urinate.

Albright also told them, according to the search warrant, that Ritterson had asked him to tell police they’d been together that Friday night, June 10, as well. However, Albright told police he was not with Ritterson that night. It was the last night that Shaun had been seen alive, when she left a Bristol Township bar about midnight or shortly after.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation in the search warrant is new. In November, as detectives reopened the case, they spoke with one of Shaun’s former roommates, Richard Wheeler. Wheeler told them about how Ritterson frequently visited his niece and she would get annoyed. According to the search warrant, Wheeler told detectives that Shaun said her uncle was trying to have sex with her.

Weintraub said detectives will continue to look into Ritterson’s alleged involvement, using investigative tools that were not available in 1977.

“We want to be able to prove that Harry Ritterson either did or didn’t kill Shaun Ritterson,” Weintraub said. “I think that it would ease (Shaun’s family’s) minds a little bit if they knew once and for all who killed Shaun.”

Nancy Ritterson, Shaun’s mother, said the first thing she thought when she heard that her brother-in-law died was that he’d never confess.

“He’ll have to answer to God, now,” she said.

“When (reporters) came to us to reopen the investigation, we were looking at a 35-plus year-old murder case,” Weintraub said. “Obviously we now have tools at our disposal that we never had access to when the murder was committed and so we were able to look at the evidence with that new perspective forensically and we have determined that there are pieces of evidence that we can use and compare ... and hopefully come up with a motive for the killing and perhaps even the identification of the killer.”